Description: When Sunima returns home to face her multi-cultural, Muslim family and announce her pending engagement, she instead becomes trapped in the family loss they never dealt with.

First Produced: 2002
Date Added: 8/28/2011
Content Advisory:
Keywords: Drama  Historical  Tearjerker  9/11  Dysfunctional families  Families  Grief and mourning  Social Issues  Mostly Male Characters 
2 Acts, 80 Minutes
2 Females, 4 Males

NOTE: Barriers is fully protected by copyright law and is subject to royalty. All inquiries concerning production, publication, reprinting or use of this play in any form should be addressed to Mark Armstrong PARADIGM 360 Park Avenue South, 16th Floor New York, NY 10010 tel: (212) 897-6400 email: marmstrong@paradigmagency.com.

Original Production Information

Barriers was first presented by Desipina & Company in 2002 at HERE Arts Center, with the following cast and credits:

KHALIL - Krishen Mehta
NAIMA - Jade Wu
SUNIMA - Deepa Purohit
SHEHRIAR - Debargo Sanyal
NABHIL - Amit Patel
ROGER - Tyler Pierce
MEI - Catherine Jhung
JEFF - David Sajadi

Director - Ashok Sinha
Producer - Rohi Mirza
Stage Manager - Julia Cole
Assistant Director – Sandeep Parikh
Set Designer - David Morris
Lighting Designer - Juliet Chia
Costume Designer  - Kirche Zeile
Sound Designer – Chris Webb
Fight Director – Ron Peretti
Music – Isheeta Ganguly
Dramaturg - Darrow Carson

*Note: Following this production, the characters of Mei and Jeff were rewritten to be double-cast with the actors playing Roger and Nabhil, and renamed Chris and Jeff.

Barriers was presented by the Asian American Theater Company and Desipina & Company on September 4, 2003 at Noh Space Theater, San Francisco; on September 25, 2003 at Stages Theater Center, Los Angeles.

KHALIL - Wajid
NAIMA - Diana Tanaka
SUNIMA – Meera Simhan
SHEHRIAR – Rodney Jao
NABHIL (also CHRIS) – Sunkrish Bala
ROGER (also JEFF) – Tyler Pierce

Director – Ravi Kapoor
Producers – Sean Lim, Asian American Theater Company and Rohi Mirza Pandya, Desipina & Company
Production Stage Manager – Cindy Fulchino

Barriers was presented by Desipina & Company on September 7, 2011 at HERE, NYC.

KHALIL – Rajiv Varma
NAIMA - Eileen Rivera
SUNIMA – Pooja Kumar
SHEHRIAR – Jon Norman Schneider
NABHIL (also CHRIS) – Sunkrish Bala
ROGER (also JEFF) –  Joe Petrilla

Director – Colette Robert
Production Stage Manager – John Nehlich
Producer – Ying Le
Set and Costume Designer – Katherine Akiko Day
Lighting Designer – Marie Yokoyama
Sound Designer – Colin Whitely
Fight Director – Jason Liebman

Review by Martin Denton

The events of last September 11th taught us many lessons, we hope; some of them are reflected in Barriers, Rehana Mirza's passionate, urgent new play. Tracking aspects of the lives of a Muslim Asian-American family living in New Jersey in the months following the terrorist attacks, Barriers examines issues that are very specific to this group of people as well as others that will resonate with anyone who experienced, directly or indirectly, profound loss on that tragic day. This is an important play: see it to learn something of what others have gone through, and see it to learn something about survival and moving on, without forgetting those who died.

The family at the center of Barriers was already badly damaged before 9/11: the father, Khalil, a Pakistani Muslim, is involved with another woman; the mother, Naima, a Chinese Christian who converted to Islam when she married, has become a sorrowful nag who is unsure of her identity. 28-year-old daughter Sunima lives and works in New York City and stays as far away from the family as possible; she has not yet told them about her engagement to Roger, a "white" man. 16-year-old Shehriar is a confused and sullen teenager, bruised by his parents' battling and his sister's apparent indifference.

The last member of the family, the older son Nabhil, is glimpsed only in memory. It's clear as Barriers begins that Nabhil was killed on 9/11 (we never learn the exact circumstances); his spirit stalks the family, each one clinging to his or her recollection of him at a particular, pivotal moment in time. The memories of Nabhil serve as both crutch and liability for these characters: some of what Barriers is about is how people can move away from a painful past, (hopefully) toward a more promising future.

Mostly, though, Barriers is a detailed, compassionate, eye-opening portrait of dysfunction within a crumbling family unit—dysfunction that is amplified by the ignorance and blind bigotry of people who lash out against their Muslim neighbors, equating the peaceful majority of Muslim Americans with the small number of terrorists who seem to want to destroy our country. Each of the characters in Barriers comes up against the effects of this hatred: Shehriar has dropped out of school for fear of being beaten up; Naima defiantly covers her head and body in traditional Muslim garb when she goes out shopping and winds up being taunted for it by local thugs; Khalil's ill-treatment by co-workers (who, he says, behave as though he has explosives strapped to his body), has led him to question his faith.

Mirza probably piles more melodramatic incident onto her play than she should; that said, what I love about Barriers is how viscerally it opens my White American eyes to injustices that I tend to nod my head sympathetically about and then dismiss when I hear about them on the evening news. Mirza has chosen her medium well—Barriers reaches out and grabs us—wrenches us—to teach us something valuable about the state of the world. The ending she has devised for the play (which I obviously won't reveal here) packs enormous emotional punch.

Barriers features a fine ensemble of Asian-American actors, including Jade Wu as the difficult, troubled Naima; Krishen Mehta as the conflicted father Khalil; Deepa Purohit as the daughter Sunima, trapped between two worlds, as it were; Amit Patel as Nabhil, caught forever in his family's memory; and, most impressively, Debargo Sanyal, whose pain and confusion as young Shehriar is palpable and heartbreaking. David Sajadi and Catherine Jhung appear in a couple of small roles each and register strongly. Tyler Pierce, as Roger, also does commendable work. Director Ashok Sinha paces Barriers deftly and fluidly, reinforcing the compelling nature of Mirza's narrative.

As we look for ways to commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11, attending a play like Barriers might be a good idea. I was upset and disturbed by this play, in some ways for reasons that are very personal to me, and in other ways for reasons that are political, or social: there's much that's happened in this country in the past year that we cannot be proud of. Barriers offers important reminders about the aftermath, for better and worse, of that pivotal event.

reviewed at HERE Arts Center

Excerpt from Barriers

SHEHRY

Hmmm... Trying to use up your unlimited night and weekend minutes? Or just trying to have phone sex uninterrupted? Or both?

SUNIMA

Haven’t you had enough of haunting me for the day? Must you continue it through the night as well?

SHEHRY

So, how come we’re always the last to know?

SUNIMA

What are you talking about?

SHEHRY

You’ve snagged a whitie, huh?

SUNIMA

(pause)

When it’s a good catch, color doesn’t matter.

SHEHRY

How do you know he’s not a Christian Terrorist?

SUNIMA

Because he’s a Buddhist.

Shehry gives her a look.

SHEHRY

Yeah okay. So how does he know you’re not a Muslim terrorist?

SUNIMA

Shehry!

SHEHRY

People think that you are one, you know.

SUNIMA

Last I saw, I wasn’t on International’s Most Wanted.

SHEHRY

But people who look like you are.

SUNIMA

Those thugs don’t look like me.

SHEHRY

But to others we all look the same.

SUNIMA

I’m missing the required masculine genitalia.

SHEHRY

Is that why you’ve never dated a South Asian?

SUNIMA

Because I’m missing male genitalia?

SHEHRY

Because you think all us thugs look the same?

SUNIMA

You’re the one who -

SHEHRY

Because we all look like thugs to you? We’re beneath your hoity toity Western education.

SUNIMA

And at 16, you’re above any education?

SHEHRY

What do you care? You’ve disappeared for the last four months –

SUNIMA

I had school –

SHEHRY

During Christmas too?

SUNIMA

We don’t celebrate Christmas.

SHEHRY

That’s bullshit.

SUNIMA

Look, do you really nee me to go into details? I had to clear out … his… apartment, okay? Who else do you think is going to do it? Ma? Pa?